ProDave

Run the stack up the corner of the hall behind the front door as planned. Up into the right corner of the bathroom where it will branch off to the WC. It must continue about 1 metre higher where it terminates in an AAV. That corner bit will be boxed in, but if your drawing is accurate you have a back to wall WC so you will be boxing in a section of wall anyway to hide the cistern. This reinforces my earlier belief, if you had just carried the stack all the way to the roof it would have emerged through the original roof not the lower roof with the velux windows.

For 3 phase you want a 5 core steel wire armoured cable. 16mm absolute minimum if a short run but 25mm would be better. It needs feeding at the kiosk with a switch fuse, 80A to discriminate from suppliers 100A fuse. Best terminate the SWA in a large adaptable box in the house, so you can take a single phase to a consumer unit and have the others terminated for future use.

The recession has already started. The last 2 months the economy contracted. It's not called a recession yet because that takes 3 months of contraction, but I am not expecting a sudden turn around so am sure the recession has started. Perhaps someone will do some creative accounting to show a tiny growth in the next month just to avoid calling it out as a recession just yet? High inflation, and low interest rates is a bad mix (for people with savings) consumers are already reducing non essential spending so they can pay for the essential things that are going up but their wages are not going up anything like fast enough to match. Train drivers on strike next week, no doubt the first of many such strikes as workers demand pay rises to match inflation, SWMBO just voted against a 2% pay offer. I have a bit more control, being self employed I put my hourly rate up 15% earlier in the year, first rise for many years. I thought we were heading for a winter of discontent, looks like it's starting earlier as a summer of discontent? I am surprised the housing market has not collapsed? Who wants to commit to a big mortgage with rising inflation, rising (too slowly) interest rates and WWIII looming? The message from the BOE is we are all being naughty people and spending too much fuelling inflation so we must raise interest rates to punish you naughty consumers who dare to borrow money so spend. Yet interest rates are still at "emergency low" levels and if they went up to the levels really needed, i.e. close to inflation rate, that would really crash the economy and there would be a lot of mortgage defaults and repossessions. It is not high consumer spending causing the high inflation, so the traditional raise interest rates to slow spending is going to do nothing to stop fuel and food costs rising, so is futile (though I believe interest rates need to rise a LOT for other reasons) The truth is the economy has been propped up with unrealistic low interest rates for the last 14 years and we are now stuck with a weak economy that can't support proper interest rates. But then there is the conflicting messages about low unemployment and there are in fact more job vacancies than there are unemployed people, so in theory there should not be any unemployed? That makes this different to the 70's and 80's when there was real high unemployment. And now they are criticising the "economic inactive" How dare you decide you have had enough of working, you have enough savings and pensions so you retire. How dare you do such a thing? (next year for me). I am no economist, but I am glad I have no borrowing and soon to be out of the workplace, but the steady, comfortable, secure retirement I had been looking forward to is looking a lot less certain and things are looking very fragile indeed. I am a worried man.

Do you really like that look out of your bedroom window? To me it looks like you need to run the lawnmower over it?

Absolutely. The only reason for being a member of such a scheme in England and Wales is so you can self certify for part P, which thankfully we don't have up here.

That is what I was trying to describe but without the luxury of doing a drawing. The lintel bridging the hole through the wall has to be higher to allow for it. I still don't understand if the stack pipe goes straight up from where it is shown in the corner of the existing hall behind the front door, how it is going to exit the lower roof with the velux windows? Surely it would just go up in the corner of the room above?

Sadly, being a member of the NICEIC does not appear to mean his is a "good" electrician. I hear lots of complaints about their members, and it appears even complaining to the NICEIC about a members work achieves nothing. In fact there is a rather cynical view that the only time NICEIC will actually do something, is if they find someone using their logo or claiming to be a member when they are not. Yes an EIC should have been issued, but the Schedule of test results is pretty much identical to what would be on an EIC. Yes it would be a C3 so it would still get a "satisfactory" outcome. Very poor that he did not discuss options with you. communication with the customer is important so they get what they want, or agree a compromise if what they want is not possible or at least very difficult.

Well done, you have done the landlords job for him.

Isn't the stack pipe in the corner of the original 2 storey house so it would emerge through the original roof not the lower roof with the velux windows? I don't see why a rest bend could not go at the bottom, but the opening and lintel in the wall would have to be much higher and the bend would intrude into the floor make up of the extension so that would have to be formed around the bend.

No, fixed heating appliances over (iirc) 2kW should be on a dedicated circuit. Did he discuss this with you first? It might be that due to the house layout or construction it would be a major job to get a new cable through to the consumer unit, or there might not be any spare capacity in the consumer unit or the consumer unit might need upgrading? In other words he might have done this as a quick and cheap solution to save what would otherwise have been a very expensive and disruptive job, but I would have discussed the issues and problems with the customer if it were me. Is this immersion for regular use, or just there as a backup if the boiler breaks down and unlikely to get much use? that may have swayed his thinking. It is unlikely to be "dangerous" but taking that much load from a ring final would restrict what other loads can run from that circuit and could lead to nuisance tripping if the washing machine, dishwasher etc were on at the same time as the immersion heater.

I took the reduction experiment one step further (literally) reducing to a bit of 20mm mdpe which has a bore of about 16mm. That really killed my flow rate to less than half, and put immense back pressure on the fittings that made up the reduction forcing one to blow apart. So I think my sweet spot for reducing the size is 20mm bore. I am currently eyeing up an old radial air fan for equipment cooling (sometimes known as a snail fan) Thinking it would be easy to swap the present ac motor for my little dc servo motor. The challenge would be making a suitable impeller (candidate for 3d printing?) I will do a sketch if @Onoff fancies a challenge?

Thinking about @joe90 suggestion, A quick rummage amongst my various bits,. cobbled together a quick set of different size pipes of reducing size to gauge the effect. Hydro_experiment.mp4 The final bit of "pipe" in that contraption is a bit of flexible conduit with a bore of about 20mm It definitely increases the velocity (measured by how far will the jet of water reach) and I lose about half a second on the time to fill the bucket test. So next experiment is try and cobble together a mini turbine to see if this has any merit.

I think that is certainly true if you are trying to increase the pressure to get a small high pressure jet to drive a turbine or pelton wheel type device. For an overshot wheel that I am experimenting with I don't think it would make any difference.

I need more / larger pipe. The availability of that will determine if this moves forward. To just go out and buy it would cost far too much so I am "searching"

So the technical analysis. The wheel is rotating at 32 rpm, so with the 17:1 gearing my motor / generator is doing 544 rpm. At that speed it is generating a disappointingly low 3 volts. I didn't attempt a proper load to measure what power it would produce as I know it would be tiny. If I short circuit the motor, the wheel does slow down slightly, but not as much as I would have thought. I think (certainly for this speed) the motor I have is a poor candidate as a generator, but it was the only one I had. My flow rate looked poor to me, so I re measured it. I am getting barely 1 litre per second. But it's not a pipe blockage or lack of water, that is all it will deliver at that height. Drop the pipe down to the bed of the burn and it's back to 2 litres per second. Baked bean tins are poor "buckets" for this application. Roughly 50% of the time the delivered water hits the side of the tin rather than go in it, which will add nothing to the rotation of the wheel. conventional square buckets are what's needed with any overspill just dropping down onto the bucket below. I am unsure if I will take this further, it does at the moment seem like it's never going to be a source of useful power. I might look at turbine ideas instead?

Okay, we have eaten enough beans / soup / rice pudding and today was the day to "give it a splash" So I had driven a post into the burn to support the wheel, and rigged up, with bits of wood and G clamps, to hold the delivery pipe and give it a go. I had set this up to rotate "with the flow" that is the bottom of the wheel would be travelling in the same direction as the burn. I had expected to feed it with the water feed pointing downwards making ir a breast fed water wheel. That proved not to work and gave very little rotation of the wheel and a lot of splashing. I found the best results were feeding right at the top, making this on overshot water wheel. Of course it is set up completely wrong for that and the feed pipe is actually delivering it's water upstream in this test. If this goes any further I would re jig the wheel to rotate the other way. The other finding was i needed the water to exit the pipe as a clean stream, the raw end of the pipe made too much of a broad spread of water. A rummage in the "plastic pipe" bits box found part of an old sink trap that made a good reducer and gave a clean water flow. So this is the trial. Water_Wheel_1.mp4 I will post again later with some technical analysis

Work put how the system works re room thermostats etc and check the correct zones turn on and show some flow on the flowmeters. Get a cheap IR thermometer to measure the floor temperature and pipe temperatures. 24 degrees won;t feel "warm" to the touch.

I read the tone of this thread as more of a "which ASHP to avoid buying" or at very least a question to ask of your supplier and demand a reply in writing stating what the standby power consumption is, so if you then encounter such a high standby power consumption you have a valid complaint. I do agree, if you have one of these power gobblers, turn it off in the summer.

STOP RIGHT THERE. A high start up current like that means this is not an inverter driven ASHP. Before you think of upgrading your supply, choose a different, inverter driven ASHP that will have soft start and will modulate it's output to match demand.

Split phase is uncommon now, it is essentially a single phase supply, but derived from a centre tapped 460V transformer. You have a 3 phase supply head with 3 fuses as that is standard equipment, one will be unused. How do you know if the second feed is not live? You would have to break the seal on the fuse to determine that? Or is it connected to something? A picture of what you have might be interesting. As far as your supplier is concerned, get a 3 phase meter. The may or not connect the "3rd phase" but they might? It won't do anything. A 3 phase meter will ensure you only have one MPAN and only pay one standing charge. Because it is so unusual, all I can suggest is you ask your supplier for a 3 phase meter and see what the meter man says when he turns up. Have a second single phase CU raeady to connect it to.

Cables are supposed to be supported, not just hanging, using metal cable clips above an exit route to stop cables hanging down in the event of a fire. Plasterer will expect cables and back boxes in the wall if plastering direct to blocks. Some pipe insulation would be good and sound insulation between floors if your BC demands it or you want it.

I notice with a lot of trades I meet on jobs, most of them are very "old school" in their working practice, at 10 O clock they go out and sit in their van for half an hour for a cup of tea, same at lunch time. Me, i just carry on and "graze" on the go. I would rather finish the job and be home sooner, rather than take a break and do nothing in that time.

Interesting observation as you have the same unit as me. Ours has been in use about 4 years now. I dutifully turn the unit off and withdraw the heat exchange modules from time to time and the filters are always in good shape. I take them off, give them a bit of a shake outside, give them a hoover to suck any dust out of them, then put them back. I guess one day they will need replacing, but not yet. We too are rural, there is not much population upwind of us, pretty much all the way down the Great Glen to Fort William.

Careful. you are assuming the openings have actually been made to the size on the drawings. My builders came and measured the actual as built opening sizes before ordering the windows.

I am in the minority here, I am in favour of an hourly or daily rate. If someone asks me to price a job on a fixed price, I have to allow for every difficulty that might get in the way of doing the job and price it on a worst case guess of the hours it will take. That almost always ends up at a higher price than the actual hours the job takes. If you are happy at paying more, then go ahead and keep pushing for a fixed price. I guess the difference is I don't advertise and all my work is through personal recommendations, so if I was a lazy so and so and charged an hourly rate while working slowly or not even working then I would be out of business very soon.